That would be a good thing, too.
The thought that was always with me, though, was much darker. What if Kazan or Stallings had touched her? What if they’d done something to her?
The prospect made me nauseous.
If they had, I’d help put it behind her. She was one of the strong ones. Amelia would be okay. We’d be okay once we got back to Florida.
Before I could take her home, though, I had to find her.
When we were far away from civilization, we dropped down low, probably only five hundred feet or so above the tops of the trees, the pilot following the contour of the jungle.
Through the open cargo door, I could feel the temperature drop as we followed, for a time, the course of a river. I could smell the musk of rotting wood and vine, the quarry scent of fresh water.
One of Tomlinson’s favorite assertions is that for a certain type of person-both of us included-an external association with water is as important as internal consumption. Oddly, just knowing I was over water made me feel better.
But the feeling didn’t last long.
From the cockpit, I heard the pilot shout Shit, a word that, in Spanish, has an ironic, musical sound. Then he yelled, “Those sons of bitches!” as the chopper twisted suddenly to port.
I knew then that we were in trouble.
The helicopter was equipped with some kind of a radar-detection system. As the craft turned, I began to hear a steady beeping noise. I leaned to look into the cockpit and could see a flashing red light on the control panel. If I hadn’t known what the noise was, I could have guessed what it meant when the pilot began jinking wildly, making hard lefts and rights, as if trying to do evade.
The beeping alarm meant that something on the ground was tracking us.
For the Anfibios, it wasn’t so bad. Except for the commando belted to the M-60 machine gun, the rest were strapped tight onto the bench seat across from me. From old habit, though, I chose to add an extra layer of protection between my butt and the chopper’s thin armor. Any kid with a rifle can shoot up through the belly of a helicopter. From what I knew about Colombia, there were bound to be a lot of people down there with rifles. Probably eager to use them, too.
I was sitting on the briefcase that Harrington had provided me. I, too, wore a seat belt, but the surface of the briefcase was slick, and I began to slide violently one way, then the other, as the chopper jinked. I kept myself steady by holding on to the nylon strap overhead until, during a unbelievably sharp turn, the strap broke.
The fuselage of the chopper wasn’t the only thing that was outdated.
From the flight deck, the beeping horn changed to a loud, high-pitched warble, as I heard the pilot yell, “They’re firing at us, those sons of bitches just fired!”
And I thought to myself: Stinger missile.
You’re dead, Ford. Dead.
The Stinger is a man-portable, shoulder-fired, infra-red, heat-seeking guided missile that travels faster than the speed of sound. It weighs less than forty pounds and comes with a disposable firing tube.
In Afghanistan, mountain people used Stingers to shoot down a couple hundred Russian MIG fighter jets. For a computer-controlled missile sufficiently sophisticated to discriminate between background clutter and an actual aircraft, this old chopper wasn’t much of a challenge.
Our door gunner had opened fire: a deafening staccato clatter, tracers streaming through the darkness, and spent brass casings ringing bell-like against the fuselage.
There was no way the gunner had a target. No way he could see what he was shooting. When the adrenaline is in you, when you’re scared, you squeeze the trigger. That simple.
Chaos.
In the cockpit, the radar alert had changed again, this time to a loud and steady shriek. I knew the missile had locked on to us and was vectoring toward the exhaust pipes of the craft’s overhead engines. There was now no escape.
We went into a steep dive, then the cabin began to rotate wildly beneath the rotor. It was a sickening replay of my previous crash landing in a helicopter. Now the nightmare was repeating itself. Could this really be happening?
I held tight to the handle of the briefcase, trying to stabilize myself, knowing that I was about to die, the realization of it roaring in my ears, feeling it as a weight on my chest.
“Hail Mary, full of grace! Hail Mary, full of grace!”
Across from me, one of the commandos was saying his catechism by rote, and I could see Lieutenant Martinez, wide-eyed, gripping his rifle for support, the centrifugal force tremendous. He held my eyes briefly: Bad, very bad.
Which is when my seat belt broke. I was ripped free, weightless, and clawed the air wildly as the velocity of my own body carried me backward, somersaulting, out the open cargo door.
Then I was tumbling in darkness… then in space, falling, falling, beneath an explosion so close that I could feel the heat, could feel the shock wave like an expanding bubble, my body tensing for impact when I would soon hit the earth.
Impaled on a tree.
That image was in my mind…
Then I did hit, crashed into a blackness, cement-hard, that crushed the wind out of me and nearly knocked me unconscious.
I came up splashing, spitting, completely disoriented until I realized what had happened: water. I was in water. I was swimming.
To my left and ahead of me, I watched the old Huey, already aflame, auger itself into the jungle. It disappeared momentarily behind a silhouette of trees, then exploded, creating a bright halo of flame.
25
It took me several long, bewildered seconds before I realized what had happened. When my seat belt broke, I’d been dumped out the chopper’s cargo door. I’d fallen a hundred feet or so and landed in the river we’d been following.
The river seemed to be one of those deep and narrow, slow-moving rivers. The moon had drifted toward the horizon, but there was still enough light to see that the watercourse was fifty or sixty yards wide and was bordered by a high, abrupt canyon of forest.
Deep jungle has a density that muffles sound and magnifies odor. This was deep jungle, a biosphere of vine, limb, earth. It was cellar-cool, and the river created a narrow corridor of light through the mountainous tree canopy.
Drifting there, I heard a second loud explosion, then a series of smaller explosions: ordnance going off.
The silence that followed the explosions seemed a reflective pause.
It did not last long. Soon the night was filled with sound, wild with peeping, croaking frogs, humming insects, and the howling of monkeys from distant trees. The jungle’s reply to an unusual intrusion.
I straightened my glasses, glad for the fishing line I’d used to tie them in place. Then I began to swim toward the bank where the chopper had crashed. As I did, my brain sent out the careful little search requests: Did I feel pain? Were all my body parts in place? Had I suffered some terrible injury that I was still too stunned to realize?
My left shoulder hurt like hell. I’d probably banged it on something when my seat belt broke. And my right ear was adding a tinny, roaring effect to any noise it processed.
I’d probably broken an eardrum when I hit the water.
Not the first eardrum I’ve broken.
Other that those few aches and pains, though, I felt pretty good.
As I moved toward the bank, I congratulated myself-I’d been damn lucky to survive.
The sense of good luck didn’t last. I remembered that a day from now, I had to be in the village of Remanso with a couple hundred thousand dollars in cash, or they’d kill Amelia, and the others, too-if Janet, Michael, and Grace really were still alive.
I had no idea where I was or how far I had to go to get help.
I began to swim faster.
The briefcase had been catapulted out the door with me. I found it drifting high and dry, only a few dozen yards downstream.